"Theme development is a tedious and difficult task, and for the GTK devs to be so careless in breaking their API at every turn disrespects the many hours people put into making themes for it. [...] I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned." I find the tone of this one a bit too harsh and overly negative at times, but his point still stands.

There are, of course, a few of us who stay in that tenuous middle ground, and I feel that's the worst place to be. It's always in flux; one day the kernel is broken because some guy upstream managed to squeeze into the release channel a performance patch that works for the tweakers but throws everyone else out of whack. Another day the devs of a very large and popular desktop environment project decide to throw out almost all the code and ideas, and start from scratch with something alien, just because they can.

That sounds about right. I was perfectly happy on KDE 3.5, where I could get work done when I wasn't geeking around for fun's sake but, now, it seems to be getting harder and harder to find something that's stable, performant, and doesn't try to force an alien workflow on me.

In fact, I think that's the real distinction. I come into a desktop knowing what I want and, if I can't get it, I'll dig in my heels and fight until I do before I'll consider alternatives, superior or otherwise.

I switched off Windows cold-turkey onto Mandrake Linux 10.0 and it still took me several months to feel safe on an OS where I hadn't been a power user since my age was measured in single digits but I was a KDE 3.5 user from the start because I knew exactly what I wanted and no desktop was going to tell me differently.

(And I was willing to put up with eye-searingly glossy/glassy icons if that's what it took to get that level of control. Remember, this was before the XDG Icon Naming Specification.)